THE BATTLE OF THE SOUL

 

 Jason Caros  |  May 31, 2025 



It is more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city. - Proverbs 16:32

 

My family enjoys going to local music events, including concerts in the park where we can sit outdoors and listen to hometown musicians perform songs of various genres in a family setting. Some of the bands in these venues play oldies from the 70s, 80s and 90s, which my wife and I enjoy, and our daughter who is in her early twenties enjoys, for the most part, but my high school aged son—not so much. This is beside the point. 

 

Knowing how many years of practice it takes to get to their level, I greatly appreciate the talent on display by these performers as well as how much they seem to love their art. The musicians are inspiring and sometimes their songs stir up something in me. One of the catchy numbers that the band played one time was All My Favorite Songs (a more contemporary tune). The chorus stuck with me. The song begins like this: 

 

All my favorite songs are slow and sad

All my favorite people make me mad

Everything that feels so good is bad, bad, bad

All my favorite songs are slow and sad

 

(Chorus) I don't know what's wrong with me

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh

I don't know what's wrong with me

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh

 

“What’s wrong with me?” or a more declarative form of the question, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” is a healthy question to ask. It is an age-old reflection, and as imperfect human beings we have lots of opportunities throughout our lives to consider it. In fact, wise people from the ancient world all the way up to the present time advise us to be conscious of the ways we’ve gone wrong and of the negative desires that sometimes hound us. In fact, these sages say that if you don’t ask yourself the question there is something even more seriously wrong with you. It’s a sign that you lack self-knowledge, or even the beginnings of self-knowledge. In other words, you don’t know what you don’t know about the most important part of living—your own human life—and this knowledge is a sine qua non for living well. Fortunately, we can draw upon the wisdom of the ages to provide us with some good answers to the question of what is wrong with us.

 

“What’s wrong with me?” is a good question to ask oneself when something has just gone wrong, but it is also important to repeat it as part of an ongoing process of self-examination that can lead to human growth and flourishing. Related to self-reflection, “Know thyself,” is a famous maxim that has traveled to us from Ancient Greece on the long-flowing stream of time. First popularized in the 6th century BC by Thales, the father of Western philosophy, used by countless Greco-Roman thinkers, and later adopted by early Christian teachers, it has been used ever since to promote knowledge and virtuous living, and in Orthodoxy, a life lived in communion with God.[1]

 

What does Know thyself mean? In a nutshell, it is an injunction to live well. Its aim is, first, to prompt each of us to inquire about what it means to live as a human being, rather than say as a dog or a cat or a beetle or a tree—the answer is that we have a unique human nature, not the nature of some other kind of creature. Second, that we ought to live according to this nature and know what thoughts and actions correspond to good living, ultimately helping us to live truly good lives. This was the pursuit of ancient philosophers like Socrates, and theologians like Saint Paul of Tarsus, who, as an essential part of this investigation pursued Ton Kalon, or the Highest Good.

 

In the remainder of this essay, I will describe a model for self-knowledge originally developed about 2,400 years ago that helped to explain why we do the things we do and how to direct our interests and actions in a good direction, a heavenly one. Most importantly, the model ultimately deals with self-governance and virtuous living—how we can rule over our own negative passions and desires, which ultimately enslave us intellectually and morally. With this in mind, let’s start with the battle within…